Handheld electronic devices with touch-sensitive displays are ubiquitous. While these devices were originally designed for information consumption (e.g., web-browsing) and communication (e.g., email), they are rapidly replacing desktop and laptop computers as users' primary computing devices. Desktop and laptop computers, however, provide users with interfaces for multitasking across applications (e.g., sending an email using an email application while also browsing the web using a web browser application). While there has been tremendous growth of new features and applications available for handheld electronic devices, the ability to multitask and easily navigate between applications on handheld electronic devices requires entirely different input mechanisms than those of desktop or laptop computers.
Moreover, the need for navigating between applications is particularly challenging on handheld electronic devices, as they typically have smaller screens than traditional desktop and laptop computers. Some conventional handheld electronic devices attempt to address this need by recreating the desktop computer interface on the handheld electronic device. These attempted solutions, however, fail to take into account: (i) the significant differences in screen size between desktop computers and handled electronic devices and (ii) the significant differences between keyboard and mouse interaction of desktop computers and those of touch and gesture inputs of handled electronic devices with touch-sensitive displays. Other attempted solutions require complex input sequences and menu hierarchies that are even less user-friendly than those provided on desktop or laptop computers. As such, it is desirable to provide an intuitive system and method for navigating between applications with linked content on an electronic device with a touch-sensitive display.